Shame

I think most people have some cause for nontrivivial shame. Some shame of a nature that we know better than to talk about it. It need not be debilitating, what psychologists call "toxic shame", but it looms over us, a threat that is sometimes forgotten but never really gone.

How realistic is our grasp of the seriousness of this shame-causing secret? It's hard to say. In the world of social media, a secret that would have been a cause for mockery in the past might be a career-ending moment now. Meanwhile, other secrets that used to cause people to commit suicide—King George V is reputed to have muttered, "I thought men like that shot themselves," when told that  Lord Beauchamp was gay—are now no reason for shame at all. But such issues are really much less significant than they appear. Social values have always been fluid and there is nothing new about such reversals. It is part of the human condition to be able to understand the shifting morals that will determine whether we are honoured members or pariahs of our society.

With that comes the recognition that many social values are merely contingent. The supposed permanent moral truths are often contingent but so are many of the new freedoms that supposedly replace them. I have little doubt that "gender fluidity" is not a freedom but a trap for the gullible who will shortly find themselves in the merciless care of the gods of the copybook headings. Because I believe this, however, I have no need to argue the point; when someone tells you they don't believe in Gravity, you don't need to convince them of their error, just sitting back and watching them fall will do. On the other hand, you needn't feel obliged to help bandage their wounds either.

A more important question for us regarding shame is to what degree it should restrict our behaviour. You might decide that some secrets are so troubling that you simply have to stop doing whatever it is that requires you to keep these secrets. Alternatively, when you see someone else's life being destroyed because they share a similar secret to your own, you might out yourself as an act of solidarity.

No matter what you do, however, some degree of esoteric messaging will be part of your life and it's foolish to pretend otherwise.

Another issue is the shame you may have been trained to feel by your family. Not all parents do this. My mother certainly did. She'd learned the trick from her mother so I don't blame her. Nevertheless, overcoming the effects of this was part of growing up for me.

I think that last concern is what is behind Don Draper's shame at his Korean war desertion.I can't prove my theory for, if it is true, the message is esoteric, which is to say hidden. You can't come right out and say that mothers are not necessarily good for their sons in our culture. So the message has to be hidden between the lines.

In any case, Don's secret identity is a MacGuffin. That is to say, it is a device to get the plot moving forward that is ultimately unimportant to the plot. It stands for something else and that something else is Don's need to shed his mother's influence. It's a need that all men have if they want to grow up (and, unfortunately, many men fail to recognize this).

My approach gives a vastly different reading of the series than the twist most people put on it. It also gives a different twist on male life.

This meditation was inspired by the twelfth episode of the first season of Mad Men. The title of the episode was "Nixon vs Kennedy". There will be more such meditations coming.

Fatherly advice

This one comes from someone else's father but it remains the best piece of fatherly advice I ever got:

There will be days when it feels like you have to deal with one idiot after another. When that happens, the problem is you.

Another gem, this one courtesy of Wayne Levine, is that once you have defined your core values, don't tell anyone about them. Just live them. Write them on a card and place this card in your wallet so you can pull it out when you want to remind yourself. (I've got mine in Evernote.)

Levine calls these values non-negotiable, unalterable terms (which produces the too-cute acronym NUTs). It applies to many other things as well. I'd say it applies to your personal mythology. The second you tell people what your most important values are, they can use them against you. They can mock your values directly. They can also tear you down for failing to live up to them. Finally, and most damaging, they can (and will) use this knowledge to manipulate you" "Well, if you want to live up to [insert stated value] then you should [insert thing they want to manipulate you into doing]."

Finally, and this one is from me: focus on outward behaviours and not inward attitudes. For example, we often try to tell ourselves lies like, "I don't care what she thinks." But we do care and we have no direct control over that. The only thing we can control is outward behaviour. When we next see her obviously disapproving of what we are doing or saying, we can refuse to respond. She'll still know we have noticed and perhaps she'll even enjoy knowing that we are upset. But the thing we can control, we will control.

There was a song back in the 1970s called, "Free your mind and your ass will follow". A sanitized version of the same message appeared in a 1990s song called, "Free your mind and the rest will follow." Both songs get it backwards. Change your behaviour and you'll free your mind or "Free your ass and your mind will follow".

Why a personal mythology? Because it's liberating!

I think we all already have personal mythologies. And the word "mythology' shouldn't scare us for we know it isn't true in the same way that history is supposed to be true. If anything, the problem is that far too much of what we believe to be our "personal history" is actually mythology.

I've had much occasion to see this while doing family history. History tends to be either a story or a theory about particular people in particular times. The story or theory is constructed by making connections between a collected set of verifiable facts. Ideally, the facts are a limit on the story or theory. If my story or theory includes someone meeting Jane Jacobs last year that story needs to be corrected because Jane Jacobs died in 2006. What I've found doing family history is that it tends to go the other way around. In family history people have a theory about who and what "we" are and they have a series of stories that prop up this theory. When confronted with facts that are in conflict with the theory and stories, so much the worse for the facts.

Another way of putting this is that most family history is really family mythology. It's real purpose is to justify our beliefs about ourselves. Because it's unconscious mythology, it's easy to convince ourselves that it really is history and my advice to anyone doing family history is to not share it with members of your family. You will inevitably puncture a lot of egos if you insist in muddling the mythology up with verifiable facts.

Okay, but why do family history at all if you can't share it? Unless you're famous, no one outside your family will want to read it and now I'm telling you that no one inside your family will want to read it either. I'd recommend doing it because it's liberating. My great discovery was that my family was a much rougher lot than the family mythology made them out to be. It's only because two world wars and the Great Depression created opportunities for social mobility that my family was able to enter the middle class. That's generally true of the Irish in North America. All of our family "history" when I was growing up, was really mythology, consists of projecting the experience of the generation who grew up during the Depression and World War 2 back into history. It has little or nothing to do with what actually happened. The generation now growing up are, in turn, being saddled with a family "history" that is really a mythology that projects the values of a generation that grew up in the 1970s and 80s back into history.

Why is it liberating? Because family mythology creates a role for you and your family will be loath to let you out of that role. You will be told that you are a certain kind of person because you are part of this family and you will be told that continuing to be this sort of person is a moral obligation that is binding on you. Knowing that the story the family tells about itself is just a mythology frees you from that obligation.

It does this in large part because it frees you from the spell. Your family members can only saddle you with this mythology if you are willing to believe it. The mistake is thinking that your family history has anything particular to do with you. These people are just people who lived before you. You are not responsible for their sufferings and you deserve no credit for their achievements. Most importantly, you do not need to feel any shame for what they were and what they did. If, however, you believe that there is a connection, then you are going to find yourself in immediate conflict with others because you will all be fighting for a particular interpretation.

In my family, there have been intense battles over family history. Most of this has been a matter of memory rather than any actual written history. Who did what and when and what it meant? Which uncles were in military service and what action did they or did they not see? What were the challenges that women in the family faced and how did they face them. Most stories that do get repeated do so because they help make a moral point. And it's either a positive one or a negative one. But it's only useful to the degree to which it is family mythology. Each and every story makes one of two binary points: 1) You should be like this. 2) You should not be like that.

Once you know that facts destroy this binary division—that the real stories aren't black and white so much as shades of grey—you can stop arguing with others about it. And that is liberating.

The other thing about family history is that it is necessarily limiting. Even if your family history were glorious through and through, it defines you according to a fixed standard. It tells you what you are supposed to be according to an existing model. There is no teleology, no potential for development. All you have is a series of duties towards the family. That is why the Hobo Code is so liberating for Dick Whitman. It offers potential for development that his father and stepmother deny him.

An unexpected benefit that comes with this is insight into human behaviour. If your life experience is anything like mine, one of the things you've had to face is sudden aggression from other people and yourself about things that make no sense. A conversation about subjects that it seems like no one should have any personal investment suddenly becomes very heated. Without knowing how you got there, you find yourself arguing about things that shouldn't matter. Part of you thinks you could just give in, as this is something that shouldn't matter, and part of you thinks you shouldn't give in as this is something that shouldn't matter so you are rightfully suspicious of this other person pushing so hard to make you give in on an issue that shouldn't matter. What's really at work is some bit of unconscious mythology. Being able to let go at a moment like that is tremendously liberating. But you can only do that if you have some alternative set of values of your own. And that is a subject for further development.

"We all wish we were from someplace else"

This is going to be a little abstract.

How different are these two scenarios:

1. A writer has been given your personal information—your name, where and when you were born, which schools you went to, your religious belief or lack of it and so on—and has been asked to create a personal mythology for a character with your name and experiences.
2. You decide to review your life with the intention of coming up with a personal mythology.

At first glance, the difference seems blindingly obvious. The writer can only research the sorts of things a person in your place might remember whereas you know exactly what you do remember. You have a direct and authentic access to your experience that the writer can only guess at.

There is a sense in which that is true. Maybe you went to a high school where most of the kids were fans of hard rock music and wore jeans, T-shirts and workboots but you were a member of a tiny subculture whose members wore tweed jackets, grey flannels and ties and insisted on antiquated spellings such as "grey" and "shew". The writer would almost certainly miss this detail and thereby get everything wrong.

On the other hand, even rejecting the dominant culture of your school, you would have been very much influenced by it. And you have almost certainly forgotten much of what you experienced. What you remember comes in the form of stories that you and others have told over and over again and those stories often (almost always) don't match the verifiable facts of your life. What we wanted, what we felt compelled to say, in response to the two scenarios I posted above was a special and direct access to "the real me". It would seem that the most we can really say is that the person who actually lived the life will have a much better idea where to look for clues and will know of many more such clues than the writer researching their character could ever have.

The final problem is that your experiences might be a barrier to what you want to achieve. You have psychological barriers and self deceptions that stand in the way. The writer might well be more open to possibilities you are currently cutting yourself off from for no good reason.

"Here, you're an honorary"

The quote immediately above and the one in the title of this post are from the unnamed "gentleman of the rails" who visits the Whitman homestead in the first season episode of Mad Men named "The Hobo Code". The theme is freedom. But what is freedom? When we're in captivity, we, like the bird in the cage, can only imagine that freedom is a world without bars. But freedom is not freedom from but freedom for a purpose. Freedom from is empty and unsatisfying.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.

This is one of my favourite quotes. Marx, who missed the full significance of his own point, sees that to change yourself is to learn another language. An existing language.  And learning another language is a long and arduous process.

The process begins for Dick Whitman with the flashback in "The Hobo Code" and it begins with a language. In a move that Wittgenstein would have loved, the hobo teaches young Dick only four symbols:

• A pie that symbolizes that the food is good here.
• A set of teeth indicating that a vicious dog lives here.
• A sort of sickle that means a dishonest man lives here.
• A stick woman that means tell a sad story.

As Wittgenstein would say, "Conceive of this as a complete primitive language." That means that understanding this language means knowing how to use and respond to these expressions.

As Wittgenstein would note, we are already functioning at a high level here. To get even this primitive language, we must know a whole lot. Just the literal use of the expressions requires us to know what a "dishonest man" is and why it would matter that he lives here. Young Dick only learns these things in this episode.

We might also think about the metaphorical extension of these expressions. Good food and scary dogs are concepts that a child can readily understand. They can also be extended. Likewise, we can see how an adult might see potential benefits in gaining a  woman's sympathy that a child might not immediately grasp.

A dishonest man lives here, however, is in a different class.

Rejection

The episode, interestingly, begins with Bert Cooper telling Don, "I know what kind you are." He elaborates on that by saying he believes that Don is, "Productive and reasonable and, in the end, completely self-interested" and "unsentimental". Bert is suggesting that Don's personal mythology is much like the views of Ayn Rand. Don rejects that and the rest of the episode shows us why. His personal mythology is that of the Hobo.

All rebellion begins with rejection. Don rejects his mother. He doesn't accept Adam as his brother. He tells the hobo, "Ain't you heard, I'm a whorechild." At least according to the flashbacks, his biological mother was a prostitute who died giving birth to him. There is a huge problem here, though, because no child can have a flashback to his conception and birth. Later, his adoptive mother will become an actual prostitute. His father, who dies, is replaced by "Uncle Mac" who is not his uncle but his adoptive mother's pimp. He remembers Uncle Mac as having been kind to him.

Don's whole life is about a rejection of his mother. Father figures are a bit trickier. That his father is dishonest is clear but so, in different ways, are the replacement father figures—Uncle Mac, the real Don Draper, Bert Cooper and Conrad "Connie" Hilton. The only honest father figure in Don's life is the hobo and he only has a brief brush with him.

To return to the point I make at the top of this post, that encounter need not even be "real" in the ordinary sense of the world.

As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up,
knelt down before him, and asked him,
“Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus answered him, “Why do you call me good?
No one is good but God alone.
You know the commandments: You shall not kill;
you shall not commit adultery;
you shall not steal;
you shall not bear false witness;
you shall not defraud;
honor your father and your mother.”
He replied and said to him,
“Teacher, all of these I have observed from my youth.”
Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said to him,
“You are lacking in one thing.
Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor
and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”
At that statement, his face fell,
and he went away sad, for he had many possessions.

To embrace one thing is to reject others.

I'll stop here not because this is a complete thought but simply because I must stop somewhere.

This meditation was inspired by the eighth episode of the first season of Mad Men. The title of the episode was "The Hobo Code". There will be more such meditations coming.

"More of an idea than a place"

Rachel Menken says that of Israel in the sixth episode of the first season of Mad Men.

True story: the wife of a famous, and now deceased, Canadian broadcaster once told me the story of how her English ancestors' business had gone bankrupt. It was a wonderful story and I believed it. I wrote it up into a nice little piece and you might even find it if you're diligent enough about your research. (It's not online and it wasn't published under my name.) This was about 35 years ago now. Later, I discovered the identical story of a family business going bankrupt in a John Galsworthy novel. So how did that happen?

We all have a personal mythology. Over the years I've read a lot of biographies and I've written a few. There is a recurring problem with the narratives we all tell ourselves. They tend to feature turning points and when you look into these turning points there tend to be problems.

1. Sometimes, and this is awkward, the turning point never happened. The writer researching a biography goes looking for external evidence of the turning point and finds out that, it never happened, or it couldn't of happened or that it did happen only to someone else and not the person who told the story about the turning point.
2. Other times it comes way too early to be of any use. The person the writer is researching continued to express the opinions or do the things that this turning point is supposed to have altered forever for years after.
3. Finally, as you've probably already guessed, sometimes the turning point is way too late. The person who claims to have been changed forever by this experience already had the new attitudes or behaviours long before the claimed turning point. 

My friend Jeremiah calls the story we all tell about our lives the emotional narrative. It's a compelling story in which everything connects and everything makes sense. Psychologically, it tends to win out because the only alternative is a small set of data points that don't connect to anything. It's only when some serious researcher goes to work assembling a comprehensive chronology of a life that the emotional narrative falls apart.

I've written quite a few short bios myself and sometimes I find evidence that the story I've been asked to write is at odds with the verifiable chronology. That, as I say, is rather awkward. In a spirit of fair play, this Lent I did the same thing to myself. I assembled a detailed chronology of my own life. I chased down every verifiable detail. And I compared that with what I believed to be the narrative of my life. It was quite crushing. My personal mythology crumbled before my eyes.

I won't share the intimate details here but, suffice to say, some things I was ashamed of in my past turned out to be nothing to be ashamed of for these things either simply did not happen or happened much earlier than I remembered and were, therefore, not embarrassing. Other things that I hadn't bothered to be ashamed of, on the other hand, now trouble me.

Exiles on Main Street

"Babylon" is the first episode of Mad Men to feature a "flashback". I put that in scare quotes because I'm not sure it's true. When we watch a flashback on video or film we have a tendency to believe it's true. We're watching moving pictures and that makes it seem like it must have happened because, otherwise, "How could it be filmed?" This is different from reading or listening to someone tell us a story. Then we're skeptical.

When we watch Don Draper "remembering" his past it seems to me that we should treat these memories as just that. They aren't films of actual events. And the same is true for my memories and your memories. These are constructed things. Everyone, without realizing we have done so, has created a personal mythology.

That scares us. We think that because we created it—made it up—it has no value. But our personal mythology is not simply something that is not true. We lived with this mythology for years. It's part of us. It's not an accurate account of what we lived through but it is part of our experience. It's more of an idea than a place. We may never want to live there or visit there but it's terribly important that it exists.

This meditation was inspired by the sixth episode of the first season of Mad Men. The title of the episode was "Babylon". It is the second such meditation I do here and there will be more such meditations coming.

An utterly mundane observation about hypocrisy

We condemn moral hypocrisy harshly but ineffectively. Compare with the case of smoking where a barrage of condemnation has actually produced a reduction in smoking rates. There is no way to measure hypocrisy, of course, but I don't think anyone imagines there has been a reduction in hypocrisy rates.

The thing that strikes us about hypocrisy is not that it exists but that it is expressed publicly. It would be one thing to condemn others for what we do ourselves. You could do that silently. What we actually see is very public condemnation of others. This can be very overt but it can also exist in the form of a very quiet deference for moral standards we don't follow ourselves. If anything, the latter case is worse.

A long time ago, Raymond Chandler condemned a kind of moral defeatism that isn't hypocrisy in his novel The Long Goodbye,

You were a nice guy because you had a nice nature. But you were just as happy with mugs or hoodlums as with honest men. Provided the hoodlums spoke fairly good English and had fairly acceptable table manners.

As I say, that's not hypocrisy. Terry Lennox lives up to his standards. The relevant part is the line about being just as happy with mugs or hoodlums so long as the behaved well publicly. Our morality tends to be public and civilized. It exists where we can be civilized. Where we can't, we're private about it. That's why we're hypocrites who don't stand up for others whose failings are no worse than our own, because that would be to go public.

The wolf's perspective: The Good Wife is what Breaking Bad would look like if it had been done honestly

The Good Wife started and ended with a slap. Seven seasons ago, Alicia Florrick slapped her husband across the face in the moment she realized that her life was not what she thought it was. And in the series finale, Diane slapped Alicia across the face in the moment she realized Alicia was always going to put her family, and herself, first. Both moments signified a turning point for Alicia Florrick. Only this time, we won’t get to see what comes next.

I would think you shouldn't need to know what's going to happen next to understand this ending. Others feel differently. A Google search for "Good Wife Ending" and "ambiguous" gets 215,000 hits. But if you watch this carefully, I think you'll see that there is no ambiguity at all.



Pay particular attention to how she pulls herself together and goes on. That's exactly how she responded to the virtual slap life gave her in the first episode. In a sense, what we see here is an incredible kind of strength to keep going. But the something about this strength feels empty. And that's a problem because a lot of people wanted a happy ending for Alicia. Now in denial, all they see ambiguity where they should see emptiness.

The question we are naturally inclined to ask is whether she "deserved" that slap. That's a ridiculous question however. Of course she deserved it! What matters is whether it will have any effect on her. It won't. Alicia's life is exactly what always happens to people like her. That's a plain and simple, and utterly unambiguous, fact. Which makes it rather difficult to accept if you identify with Alicia and, if online comments are anything to go by, a lot of women identify with Alicia.

"The moment she realized her life was not what she thought it was."

For Walter White and Alicia Florrick the moment comes when, even though they both had tried very hard to be a good decent person, they discover that the most important people in their lives don't really respect them. They make a show of respecting them but this show, which was convincing until now, is suddenly shown to be the sham it is. That's the believable part. The unbelievable part is that Walt then goes into the business of making and selling meth. People who've been respectable middle class citizens all their lives don't do that. And they don't do that because it's terribly important to them that they are able to continue to see themselves as good and decent people. "Meth dealer" doesn't go with that.

Getting on with life does. Most of the evil most of us will be responsible in our lives goes under the heading of "getting along with life". And that is what Alicia does. We jump forward six months and we see her going back to work at a law firm. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that. Where there is potential for evil is the trap of moral narcissism and that's the trap that Alicia Florrick walks into. She, like all of us, is already part way there for we all want to think of ourselves as good. When your moral life comes to be primarily about preserving that sense of yourself as good, you're a moral narcissist. You stop doing things in order to bring about good for yourself and others and start doing them to avoid shame.

The crucial moment to borrow a line from Wittgenstein, is when "the decisive move in the conjuring trick is made, and it was the very one that seemed to us quite innocent." The decisive move is to think, "I'm a good person, I didn't deserve that." As if it would be okay to brutally betray a bad person! We make that move because it guarantees us our victim status. Thereafter, we have to remain a good person in order to maintain our moral authority. And that's why it's a conjuring trick: because we assume we know what moral authority looks and feels like. We don't for the simple reason that we don't have any moral authority simply by virtue of being a victim. Truth is not a feeling! We are convinced we need that moral authority, however, because, otherwise, how would we know that we are innocent?

From there, we slowly evolve into morally callous human beings, which is precisely what Alicia does over the next seven seasons. Whether you see it or not will depend on how susceptible you are to moral narcissists. For most of us, the answer to that question is, pretty damn susceptible!

There are early hints of trouble. In the fifth episode of the first season, Alicia is about to put another woman through hell by exposing her affair. There is a good case to be made for doing this. The problem is that Alicia is not concerned about the pros and cons for other people. What concerns her is what this says about her. She needs to know if this makes her a bad person. As if that wasn't bad enough, she goes to her daughter to get this reassurance. A morally serious adult does not go to children when looking for a moral assessment and they especially don't go to children who are completely dependent on them.

Darkness at Noon

Show us not the aim without the way.
For ends and means on earth are so entangled
That changing one, you change the other too;
Each different path brings other ends in view.

The most pathetically obvious hint ever dropped in a TV series is the name of the series, "Darkness at Noon"  that Alicia watches over the last few seasons. Setting matters and it matters a whole lot that The Good Wife is set in Cook County. Cook County is not only the most corrupt jurisdiction in the USA, it's been or been in the running for most-corrupt-jurisdiction every year sine 1921. If you can make it there, you're probably evil. It ought to bother Alicia's fans a lot more than it does that she succeeds so well in this environment.

The second thing that ought to trouble us is that Alicia, right from episode #1, she is clearly good at manipulating people. She starts with people she barely knows and slowly builds up to her closest friends. Her epitaph might well read, "She could always use a friend." Once she convinces herself that the end is justified, that it will not hurt her status as the good person wronged, Alicia goes to work with a lack of remorse that is chilling. If you notice it.

If we don't, we're on her side because we've all had a moment when we realized that our life was not what we thought it was. And the story, this is where it gets brilliant, is told from her perspective. Alicia struggles but succeeds and we root for her the same way you root for a jewel thief or an assassin when the story is told from their perspective.

"No one is what they seem to be." Alicia says that in the first season. And she's right. Funny thing is, that should be obvious. We don't see it because we're so busy hiding our own secrets. If you think you're the only one improvising and that everyone else has a script and is sticking to it, you don't notice anything unusual. Alicia has the advantage, if you can call it that, of having been rudely awakened to all this lying. Remember the old song by The Who? "I can see for miles and miles and miles ..." Well, Alicia can.

Moral character and moral acts

The issue for those of us watching at home is, "When do we get off this merry-go-round?"

I believe that if a story is truthful about the human moral landscape, it will probably not lead people too far astray. It’s the stories that do a fabulous job of presenting a false moral world that I worry about. I found Eat, Pray, Love and Sex and the City to be far more problematic than The Kite Runner and Breaking Bad, even though the latter two stories contain horrific violence and the former don’t. Eat, Pray, Love and Sex and the City present a beautifully alluring world in which selfishness leads to a glamorous, fulfilling life, whereas The Kite Runner and Breaking Bad speak truth about what is good and what is bad, and accurately show what tends to happen when we choose selfishness over love.

That's Jennifer Fulwiler explaining why she liked Breaking Bad. Of course, neither Eat, Pray and Love nor Sex and the City were meant to be portrayals of evil. Their creators thought they were creating a vision of the good life. The creators of The Good Wife, on the other hand, set out to create an account of a badly lived life in a beautifully alluring world where selfishness tends to pay off. That comes at a risk but it also has the advantage of being much closer to the world we live in that Breaking Bad was. Which brings me to this:

One of the main themes the series explores is the truth that “if you do evil things, you will bring evil into your life, even if you were attempting to achieve a greater good.” In this episode, the main character once again thought he’d do one small bad thing, because he had all these elaborate ideas about why it would ultimately make his life better. I watched with the character as his plans crumbled and his one bad action triggered a chain reaction of evil that spread even into his loved one’s lives, and I felt his pain as he found himself burdened with new and more painful problems.

If you're a Catholic, you may recognize the logic here. Some acts are bad because of their effects. We call them extrinsically evil. There is nothing wrong with lighting a charcoal fire but if you light it in the house you will kill everyone inside with carbon monoxide poisoning and, if you do this knowingly, you are a murderer. That is very different from an intrinsically evil act which is an act that, by its very nature, is evil. There is no context—no equivalent of lighting the barbecue outside in a well-ventilated space—where it could be a good act. Some people don't believe in intrinsically evil acts. I'm not one of them and I have no trouble putting dealing meth on the list.

That said, I also suspect that the list of intrinsically evil acts is a relatively short one. Most of our moral lives will be lived without our having to avoid such acts. Our moral lives will, however, involve hundreds of acts that might be either good or evil depending on the context. Alicia Florrick (I love the Lil Abner feeling that comes with that name) is a woman who tries to choose good acts but does so for the wrong reason.

And that wrong reason really hits home for she, like me and probably like you, acts to maintain her sense of herself as a good and decent person. That may seem relatively anodyne but it isn't but it can be really hard to see why it's a problem. And that is the way it should be presented in fiction.

There will be much more to say about this in the future.

Relational beings with relations

It's always interesting when someone really intelligent makes a basic mistake. Here's an example:

Like Buber he was keen to emphasize the importance of relationality—that dimension of the person which makes him unique and unrepeatable. (Benedict XVI: A guide for the Perplexed by Tracey Rowland.

That's not completely off the point. There is something about relationality, when applied to human beings, that makes you you. But it misses the essential point by a wide mark. To be a relational being is to have being in relationship with others. Are you tall or short? If you are one of those things, you are that in relation to others. Relationality is not something that exists inside you. It is a set of qualities that exist in relation to others. By putting it the way she does, Rowland takes away everything that is special about relationality.

Why she does that I don't know but I think it has something to do with a belief in the metaphysical self. That is the belief that the real me is something apart from all my relations, a special being that exists inside me and is the standpoint from which I can make the really important moral decisions.

This inner being, which is believed to be the real and authentic me, is usually understood as difficult to access. I have to peel away all the outer layers and that calls for self-denial and prayer. But getting to it is taken as the most important moral task.

Bu what if this picture is completely wrong? What if you are your body, as the Catholic Church teaches us and not some inner soul dressed in a body? What if being authentic isn't a matter of looking inside but looking outside at the relationships that make you who you are? I'd put it to you that the key point to take from relationality is not that you are something unique and unrepeatable but that you cannot be anything at all unless you are connected to others.

The Japanese have a saying: "A man is whatever room he is in."

Imagine you are a young person away from home. It's not the first time. You have enough experience at this to have a  grasp of what it's like. You've had failures and successes. This time you are with a group of people and you are doing well. You are establishing a new and exciting identity. This identity is not the person you are so much as it is the person you want to be. You didn't sit down and work out who this better version of yourself is. It's just there because that's the way human beings are, especially adult human beings and you're pulling it off successfully ... so far anyway.

And these people you are with have, without realizing it, given you a tremendous freedom. By accepting you, they are allowing you to work at being this new person. This is exciting and scary. It's a high wire act. Everything these people know about you is what you've told them and what you've shown them. That last element is the most important of the two for that is what makes it authentic. You can tell outrageous lies about who you are but you can't fake performance. And it's scary because you could fail at any moment.

You're at a table in a public space. Perhaps it's a pub or a student lounge. And you look up and, some distance away is a sibling. They are coming towards you because they've recognized you. And you get a sinking feeling that this might ruin everything. You don't dislike this sibling and he or she doesn't dislike you. But you really don't want to see them because, just by showing up, they have taken away your freedom to become the person you want to be.

The problem is not that they know "the person you really are". You could think of it that way and you'd feel a little guilty when you saw them because you'd feel like a fraud. They're going to come over and meet your new friends and start treating you as a different person from the one you've been acting as until now. Maybe you'll be the only one to notice this but it won't matter because you will feel an intense shame at the gap between who you want to be and the person your family takes you to be.

Maybe you've never experienced anything like that. I suspect you have though. It's one of the things that makes up modernity. There have always been people who were able to leave the place they came from and go somewhere else and become someone else but it is only relatively recently that just about everyone could do this. You don't even have to leave town to do this if you already live in a  city. You can hop on a bus and head across town to school or work. You could make the move almost seamlessly. Or you might not. One of the points of tension will be your family.

Let's dramatize this

Let's imagine a dramatic setting that will help us isolate and identify this tension. Most stories are designed to get us over this hump by way of some dramatic intervention. David Balfour's parents have died and then he is kidnapped. Now he is free to become someone. It might not work like that in real life. He might just crumple up and die. Or he might succeed. But it's a terribly helpful scenario in a novel. A different set of relations is the opportunity to become a new person.

But suppose we wanted to dramatize the personal narrative I've been describing above? Then we might have a dramatic break that is in constant danger of failing. You're sitting at a boardroom table. You ran away from home and you've assumed a new identity, complete with a false name. Most of the time you get away with it but you worry about running into one of the people who can connect you with your old identity and thereby drag you back to it. A coworker knocks on the door, excuses herself and hands you a note. It's your nightmare come true. The note is from your little brother Adam Whitman. You haven't seen him for years, not since you first adopted your new identity, but now he's tracked you down and he's at the reception desk waiting to talk to you.

You see what we've done here? We've taken an ordinary human situation—wanting to escape the identity that comes from being in one set of relationships and get into a new environment so you can be someone new—and made it a high stakes game where external consequences, arrest for deserting the army, act as a marker for your internal shame.

Most stories put the risk and high stakes on the side you go to after being kidnapped, have been sprinkled by pixie dust, escaped through the back of the wardrobe or been orphaned. This story reverses that. The new world has its risks but the danger is all about being dragged back to your family.

"You want to be Don Draper? You already are."

For those of you who aren't part of the less than two percent of the population that watched the show, I didn't make up that dramatization. It's from Mad Men. Don Draper is terrified of reverting to the Dick he used to be. That's something fairly new in story telling. I doubt it's completely new, although I don't know of any other story quite like it. As a consequence, most people missed the point.

The quote that is the subheading above is from The Last Psychiatrist. He misses the point too but he comes very, very close to getting it. For you might already be Don Draper. Don Draper, as his creator Matt Weiner insists, is not an anti-hero like Walter White. He's much closer to home than that.

TLP argues that Draper is a narcissist and believes that is the premise of the show. Again, that is very close but he is actually a man raised by a narcissist mother and who keeps making the mistake of marrying women more or less like his mother.

Even in a world that pretends to embrace transgression in art, a character who hates his or her mother is pushing the limits. Weiner moves that very dangerous notion one step away by using the time-honoured trick of making her a stepmother but even that isn't quite enough to defuse the tension. But it's also the appeal—watching this show allows a man to work out tensions they have with their mother.

Resentment: indignant or bitter feelings you cannot act on.

You can't easily express anger at your mother. Even if you could, what would it accomplish? But you do feel it. Not everyone feels it intensely but even a little tends to get bottled up for, "How dare you be angry!"

This meditation was inspired by the fifth episode of the first season of Mad Men. The title of the episode was "5G". There will be more such meditations coming.

Pietas

"Pietas" and its obvious English derivative "piety" is a challenging virtue for me.

Originally, virtue meant excellence and it was something worth pursuing as its own reward. For the Greeks and Romans moral law was relatively unimportant. Aristotle acknowledged that you had to have laws but they were of relatively minor importance.

That all had to change with Christianity for it was heir to a whole lot of scripture that said that moral law was very important. So what's the relationship between virtue and the law? For Aquinas, virtue seems to still be its own reward. Later, in the manualist period (17th to early 20th century) moral law became supreme. Virtue was worth pursuing because it made you better at obeying moral laws. Virtue by itself was nothing. And so a virtuous person became not someone who was good at doing something but a person who was good at not doing things. By the early 20th century, the expression "a virtuous woman" came to mean a woman who had not had sex if single and had had sex with only her husband if married. And it was generally taken that the when the married woman had sex she did so out of duty rather than enthusiasm on her part. (Men were held to the same standard in theory but not in practice.)

Sexual "virtue" in women was only the most extreme example. Morality came to mean our duty to follow the law both in Catholic and protestant teaching. Today, the reigning conception of ethics for most liberals remains deontology, that is, a morality of duty. To be sure, liberals have discarded many of the sexual duties as well as filial piety towards parents and state but duty remains the central concept and, as social justice warriors demonstrate daily, woe on the person who failed to recognize the reigning notions of duty and wore a sombrero on the Cinco de Mayo. Not surprisingly, some people rejected, and continue to reject, this sort of morality as duty as something cold and inhuman. Because it is cold and inhuman!

Pietas means many things but it definitely includes duties to other human beings and not just God. In a world where we define virtue not as a quality that a human being has, not as something they are, but as a matter of performance, we are going to tend to see the pious son as the one who always does what his parents want him to do. His virtue doesn't make him anything because he is only valued to the extent that he performs as desired.

HIGH PERFORMANCE ORIENTATION societies have characteristics such as...

• Value training and development.
• Value competitiveness and materialism.
• View formal feedback as necessary for performance improvement.
• Value what one does more than who one is.
• Expect direct, explicit communication. 

LOW PERFORMANCE ORIENTATION societies have characteristics such as...

• Value societal and family relationships.
• Value harmony with the environment.
• View formal feedback as judgmental and discomfiting.
• Value who one is more than what one does.
• Expect indirect, subtle communication.

Piety towards your parents is going to be a very different thing depending on which sort of environment you are operating in. Presumably, we will all travel between both. That is to say, our job will be a high performance orientation environment and our family and friends less so. It makes sense to fire someone because you think you can find someone who can perform better. It makes sense to value the high-performing employee above the low-performing one. It makes sense to value these people for what they do more than for what they are. In fact, we judge it a vice to hire friends and family over others. In this world, I and others will judge my piety as being indistinguishable from obediently conforming to the expectations my superiors have of me.

Someone might object that conforming seems not to match modern liberal society where rebellion and competition are valued. Yes they are valued but only to the degree that they serve a shared set of values. Our "rebels" all conform to a narrowly proscribed set of values. Try being a  conservative rebel and nonconformist on a university campus and you will be sneered at and maybe even brutally suppressed. You may only rebel according to accepted models.

The limit for liberal deontology is Kant's principle that we never treat others solely as means. So, while you will treat the hired hand—for instance, the barista who makes your coffee this morning—as a means, you will not treat them solely as such. Assuming an opportunity ever comes up for you to think of them as anything else but the means to get a  good cup of coffee but it probably won't. At the other end of the scale are the people who you see primarily as ends in themselves. But only primarily; there could be kinds of performance that would lead you to sever relations with them but there probably won't; most of the time, their performance will not affect your relationship for you value them for who they are (as ends in themselves) rather than what they do (as means).

Now, it may also seem that families will be low performance oriented environments where people are valued for what they are. Well, they should be but they tend not to be. My family certainly wasn't. A standard of performance according to expectations set down by management was very much the reigning morality. One of my mother's frequent admonishments to her children was "If you want to be part of this family." My mother wasn't a horrible person. She just didn't get what a family should be and she didn't because she grew up in a high-performance-orientation society that didn't (and still doesn't) get what a family is supposed to be. Her understanding, like that of many (perhaps most) mothers of her generation of filial piety was always that her children should do what she wanted and share her values. (See Betty Draper as the supreme example this.)

"Name don't blame," as therapists say. It's pointless to blame our parents for this. My mother was as much a victim of this as a perpetrator, which is to say she learned it all from a very ambitious Irish mother who had driven her children to success. (We blame WASPs for this mentality but there is nothing peculiarly white or protestant about the work ethic.)

So what can we do about all this now? The solution our liberal culture pretends to offer us is a rejection of piety but it does this by substituting one kind of piety for another. For example, we used to be puritanical hypocrites about sex and now we are puritanical hypocrites about food and the environment. Besides, I think piety, including filial piety, is a very important virtue that is essential for us to have a happy, healthy state and to pursue happy, healthy lives. "Honour your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you." This is, St. Paul tells us, the first commandment with a promise. If all it means, however, is a requirement that we live up to our parents' expectations it is a cold and inhuman law and no virtue at all.

Nietzsche from the Wolf's perspective

Why truth?

Because, way back on the playground, there was a kid who was bigger, stronger, smarter and better looking than the rest of the kids. He wasn't a bully but he had superior advantage and he used it and adults didn't rein him in much because he was smarter and better looking in addition to being bigger and stronger.

And we wanted to be treated "fairly". The problem is that all the things we didn't like about what this kid did with his superior advantage we would have done too had we had that advantage. Every reasonable doubt we might raise about him in our desperate insistence that superior advantage was not the same thing as superior tout court could be raised against our own perception. So we need a neutral concept that is separate from anyone's particular perception. Objective truth, that's the ticket.

And you can still go with that if you're so inclined, Check back with us when you have worked out the problems that go with "objective truth". I hope you don't mind if we get on with our lives in the meantime.

And we might also note, while you're working at it, that all attempts to arrive at some sort of objective truth until now have failed. So Truth, is really an illusion and a willingly held illusion is a kind of lie.

Okay, so what's wrong with this? Perhaps nothing.

Except language. To make all this work, Nietzsche has to imagine a bunch of atomistic human beings arriving at language so that we could use it as a tool to cooperate. And that's backwards.

Human beings tend naturally to cooperate. We also tend naturally to stab one another in the back but that sort of treachery is only possible against an assumption that cooperation is the normal state of affairs. Language isn't a tool to make cooperation possible. Rather, language is possible because human beings are beings that share activities. It's not something that we do; it's something that we are. Humans are beings that share activities with other human beings (and some other animals) the way fish are animals that swim in water.

The truth that goes with this is not the sort that rationalistic philosophers hanker after but it's real enough and it's more than some sort of meaning created by a supreme act by some sort of super man.

And it isn't art either.

It's the kind of agreement that is necessary to share a form of life.